Reaper of Souls Legendary Item Gallery #4, Plus Strategy

Posted By: January 31, 2014

We posted one, two, three big collections of legendary items earlier in the beta, but it’s been a while. So now it’s back, and bigger than ever! (As she said.) Glory in a fresh Reaper of Souls Legendary Item Gallery with over 100 level 70 legendary and set items, the majority of which were found by myself and other members of the INC guild in the past week since the new improved legendary drop rates went in.

Everyone loves a good nosy.

Guilds have a very cool feature that anytime someone loots (but not gambles) a legendary everyone in their guild who is online at that time sees a notification in the text box, and they can click it to see the new score. Those announcements also go into the Guild notification messages, and anyone in the guild can scroll through those and see what the others found since you were last online. Handy, a conversation starter in-game, and helpful for someone like me collecting such images for gallery updates.

I’ll put all the pics in a huge gallery below, sorted by name, but first here are some of the more interesting finds with some individual commentary about how legendaries and the overall item game is going in Reaper of Souls.

It’s interesting to find the updated lvl 70 versions of some of the better (or the useless) Diablo 3 legendary items. This is the first Mempo I’ve seen in RoS (I didn’t find it) and it’s excellent, but the limits on primary stats keep any item from being as OP as this hat is in classic D3. So it’s got a big mainstat roll, res all, a socket, and the special bonus to IAS (which generally has smaller values in RoS than it did in D3). But the +10-12% life and the additional random roll that might pop to Critical Chance can’t be rolled in RoS. (Or perhaps the Res All and/or Mainstat are random?)

In any event, you’ll never get a Mempo with 5 primary affixes + the inherent IAS, as the old D3 version can roll. You could add Crit Chance to this, but you’d have to enchant one of the 4 mainstats into it, and of them the AllRes or IAS is the most expendable, in terms of making the least difference to your well-geared lvl 70 char.

Newly-found Mempo of Twilight in Reaper of Souls.

Legendary Jewelery

Not yet enchanted…

The best piece of jewelry I’ve found so far in RoS is a Unity ring, and it’s spectacular. Aside from that, I’ve found maybe a dozen orange rings and amulets, and none of them have been better than my best rare jewelry, and that’s still true even now that more Legs + Forgotten Souls are dropping, which makes enchanting Legendaries much more possible than it was earlier in the beta.

My Monk is my best char, geared enough to handle Torment 1 pretty easily, and he’s wearing sets and legendaries in every slot… except for rings and amulet. What’s the problem with legendary jewelry, then?

Click through for that, plus the huge galleries of set and legendary items.

The issue with rings and amulets, and also with Gloves, is that you really want damage stats on those items, and with only 4 primary affixes, you pretty much have to hit all of them. There are 5 damage stats of most utility. In roughly descending value they are, Critical hit Chance, Critical Hit Damage, Mainstat, +damage, and Increased Attack Speed.

That’s not the classic trifecta order of Diablo 3, since IAS is much less valuable (for paper DPS, at least) in RoS. There are a few reasons for that, but chiefly:

Mainstat rolls much higher (500-800 in RoS vs 100-200 in D3).

IAS rolls lower (4-6% in RoS vs. 8-12% in D3).

And +damage is more impactful with so much higher mainstat leveraging it. (This goes for Crit Chance and Crit Damage as well.)

So, for a top quality ring/amulet you pretty much have to have CC, CD, Mainstat, and either +damage or IAS, and you get that, or even 3 parts of that with a 4th primary you can enchant, on a very tiny % of jewelry. And since you find or can gamble 100 rare rings/amulets for every legendary, it’s just an issue of RNG and probability. (Legendaries *should* be better long term, since they can roll higher values for mainstat than Rares can, not even counting their special legendary properties or affixes.)

The best legendary jewelry I see keeps coming very close, often with 2 of the quinfecta stats in the primary affixes, but usually some other useful stat like +vit or AllRes is crowding out the desired damage affixes. And sure, +95 AllRes or +450 Vitality is very useful, but you can get those stats from other armor pieces where you can not get the damage stats. Many of the rings and amulets can *never* be top quality, since they’ve got 2 or 3 inherent stats that aren’t the damage ones you need on a piece of jewelry.

Bul-Kathos’ Wedding Band, for instance.

The inherent life steal is pretty weak.

The inherent life steal is pretty weak.

There’s an inherent roll to mainstat (great) and Critical Hit Damage (great) but while Life per Hit and +Life% are very good mods, they’re not what you want on jewelry, and those all seem to be inherent stats with no variation allowed on this ring. You could enchant the +Life% into Crit Chance and make a very good ring, but it would never be truly top of the line on DPS, which is what most players want from their fingerlings.

The big exception to this trend is the Unity I thumbed above, since it rolled with a trifecta, the LpH can be enchanted to Crit Damage for a great quadfecta, the +damage roll is much higher than a rare can get… and the special property is a giant +12% damage to Elites which is not something a rare ring can roll. That’s a hugely-useful affix, especially in Torment+, where boss hit points are off the charts.

Enchanting Jewelry

The final problem with legendary jewelry is enchanting. It’s much better now than it was a week ago, when Forgotten Souls were so hard to come by (each enchant of a legendary or set uses up a FS), but they are still pretty scarce. Furthermore, the massive array of possible affixes on jewelry, that makes rolling a trifecta or quadfecta so hard in the first place, makes replacing a dud stat with one you really want… that much harder.

If you haven’t yet had the joy of burning up all 8 of your hard-won Forgotten Souls just trying to turn a primary affix into Critical Damage on an amulet… wait. Just wait. It’s such fun! (This is not hypothetical. Goddamned amulets.)

The inherent life steal is pretty weak.

The inherent life steal is pretty weak.

Set Items

One of the main complaints about BoA on legendaries and the limited stash space is that it will make completing Item Sets too difficult. That might be true, but finding all of any of the end game sets was a lot harder in D2, since almost every set had at least one ultra-rare item. That’s not the case in RoS; the items in the sets aren’t spectacularly hard to find, but you’ll obviously need some luck and patience to gather them up. And isn’t that how item sets should work? Play with friends so you can trade legs, and run a tab. Today you find an item from Immortal King that your Barb friend wants, next week he finds Inna’s helm that your Monk wants. BFFs forever! (Good luck on the mainstat rolls.)

In the last month of the RoS beta (most of which was played with much lower leg drop rates) I’ve found several single set items, plus 2 items from Blackthorns, and 3 from Natalya’s… unfortunately 2 of those were the Cloak, as you can see in the comparison image below. I really want a third one since that’s what enables the huge 7% Crit Chance set bonus. No more does that come with just two of the items. You need three now which means it is still attainable for non Demon Hunters, but you’ll have to wear the boots and ring, plus the helm, and with the Dex bonuses in there it’s probably only a real viable gear option for the Monk. (The Cloak and xbow in the set are DH-only.)

The big CC set bonus now requires 3 equipped.

My DH found both.

New set still needs a proper name.

The bad old days…

One thing I don’t so much like about sets is that almost all the set bonuses are very utilitarian. Functional and powerful to be sure, but they’re mostly just +stat, +res, +CD or CC or IAS, etc. Most of the quirky, flavorful, build-tweaking bonuses seem to be on individual legendary items, rather than set items, or from Item Set bonuses. I’d like to see a bit more flavor from set bonuses.

Torment Legendaries

Sadly, I have little to say here. I’ve played a fair amount of torment with my Monk and some with my DH (that’s where she found her second Natalya’s Embrace) and have thus far found zero legendaries that were any different or better or special, compared to the legs found in lower difficulties.

The legendary drop rate is supposed to be much higher in Torment, but since the killing speed is much slower (at least with my current gear) I find more legs per hour facerolling through Hard.

There are supposed to be special higher quality legendaries in Torment, but I’ve not found any yet. The legs I have found have been indistinguishable (in type and roll) from the ones I find in lower difficulties.

There are supposed to be special Legendary crafting plans that only drop in Torment and above, but their drop rate is so ultra-rare now I don’t know that you’d ever notice. I’ve found a total of one crafting plan since the last patch “fixed” their buggy-high drop rate, and it was from a Treasure Goblin knot in a Nephalem Rift on Hard difficulty. (And crafting legs/sets is of dubious value now anyway, with most of the results much too randomized and lacking in special legendary properties to be worth the time and expense to create.)

I haven’t played anywhere near enough Torment for my finds (and non-finds) there to be anything more than statistical noise, but if you’re planning to crash and crawl your way into Torment, spurred by a belief that once there you will swiftly and surely find uber items beyond anything you could get in lower difficulties… good luck, but I’ve seen zero evidence to support that strategy.

For now it’s best to gear up and zoom through Normal or Hard, racking up the most kills, the most Shards, and finding the most legendary items possible. If your goal is efficiency, don’t even think about Torment until you have good legendaries in almost every slot, and are able to blast it yourself. Unless you’re planning to party leech or you have friends who can pull you,

My Monk has nearly 800k DPS and most Elite fights still feel pretty slow, so I’d think 1000k is a good standard for pretty quick Torment 1 killing… though that varies greatly between the classes. Monks run pretty low on “paper” DPS since they don’t have any straight out +%damage passives. My DH in my Monks’ gear is over 1000k DPS standing in town, and she’s nowhere near his killing speed or survival in Torment.

Comments

If the game was designed around crushing blow and monster hit points were scaled appropriately, and then on top of that crushing blow was removed from the game, then perhaps more affixes could be allowed into the primary slots like in vanilla.

Any time Flux does a big write up it takes me back and I get all nostalgic because it was Flux’s top 10 best (and worst) unique items back during D2 that got me to stumble across this site and get hooked on this place.

Nice we have a few more than a handful of legendary items worth talking about now.

I found an enchantress focus legendary on torment 1 earlier and would like to add that I have found that playing torment does seem to give better legendaries. After playing in a torment game for an hour in a group, I found 2 legendaries, one of them gambled and both upgrades

I found a legendary Enchantress Focus earlier and have found that legendaries are much better from Torment. From a group game earlier on Torment 1 I found two legendaries, one from gambling, and both were upgrades

ATTACH=CONFIG]5252[/ATTACH]
[ATTACH=CONFIG]5253[/ATTACH]The Paddle and Stormshield both from the PTR so only at level 60. You can make items show their possible stat ranges by holding Ctrl over them when in inventory, just as an FYI. I had to press Ctrl and release and hit screenshot real fast to get them to show in a screenshot.

To be fair the ss looks alright, mostly because of the huge melee damage reduction. Not sure why they apparently nerfed block values and health globe bonuses though.
The daibo sucks though, and huge stat ranges hurt it as well.

You can make items show their possible stat ranges by holding Ctrl over them when in inventory, just as an FYI. I had to press Ctrl and release and hit screenshot real fast to get them to show in a screenshot.

That’s a useful feature I should mention more often, since I’m sure many peole don’t know about it yet. (There’s an actual tooltip on item hover, bottom of the window, where it says “hold Control for roll” or something like that.

As for that feature, it’s buggy or weird in some ways, as you often have found items with higher stats than the roll says is possible. And if you enchant you will get lower values.

Recently I found a rare Xbow that had no need for an enchant. socket, IAS, and Dex were the primary stats, so there was nothing to roll (I could have gone for a bit of an upgrade on the Dex, I guess. But the damage roll wasn’t great, something like 2080 DPS with (hypothetical figures since I don’t have it to look at now) 473-1198 for the actual damage. (One handed xbows are like 1.60 APS, so their DPS is considerably higher than their damage values.)

But on the Ctrl display, it listed 450-1100 for the possible values, and when I enchanted the damage roll (mostly as an experiment) it lost considerable damage, dropping to something like 1790 DPS from 425-1014. I rolled it 3 or 4x and the damage range stayed around there, with a DPS like 250-400 lower than it had initially dropped at.

This is not uncommon; quite often items show a higher value when first found than the Ctrl shows their possible roll, and those lower values are what you get for that affix if you enchant it. I’m not sure where the bug comes from here, but I don’t think it’s with enchanting; there’s some kind of bonus stat on “found” items that you don’t get on vendor-bought items, (never see a vendor item of equivalent quality to a top rare) and enchanting rolls from from that field?

I found those Tasker and Theo gloves on T2, a very nice addition to a wd. I play most on T1-2, and thhose gloves are the only one item it seems to be a torment only legendary, from what I funded so far.

I’ve seen Tasker and Theo earlier in the beta (people were *****ing about the lack of a socket) I think from below Torment. Might have changed since then, of course.

I need to do some more multiplayer, especially on torment to get a better sense of comparison of drop quality and frequency. I’ve mostly multiplayer on lower difficulties for fast run/fun testing, and done torment mostly solo to get a real sense of how the diff scales, which is harder to estimate in a party since there are so many more moving parts.

What really disappoints me from this item spread is how many of them don’t have anything special about them. The ones that do have special affixes seem really good: the procs seem useful, and the buffs to existing skills seem meaningful. For the ones where the special stat is an extremely high amount of a regular affix, such as Doombringer’s ‘physical skills deal 40% more damage,’ the extra large boost also feels special and strong.

However, for a large number of the legendaries, they still had no special affixes or anything differentiating them from regular rares. The ones that do exist are really good, but so many of them are still just boring stat-sticks. If Blizzard is really serious about overhauling legendaries, they all need to be special in some way. If the point of crafted legs is to be mid-level items that help you work up to finding the good stuff, then those don’t necessarily have to have special stuff, but every legendary that you find from drops/gambling should have something special making it useful to a certain build, or doing some kind of cool proc.

Some interesting items for sure. Cindercoat seems like a very build-changing piece now.

I’m kind of disappointed that they didn’t address the useless “x% chance to CC” type of affix, though, given that they talked about how that particular attribute didn’t feel very epic. I mean, just look at the Standoff polearm – 2h weapon, 0.95 attacks per second and a stunning 1.2% chance to blind on hit. Why? “With this, one warrior can hold back an army”. Yeah, right.

Naturally I’m hoping that is the case, but as we draw closer to release and my personal pet peeves remain untouched (this and pre-identified rares), it’s looking more and more unlikely that they’ll be addressed.

This seems like such a simple thing to fix, as well: just up the range from 1-5% to like 5-15% (depending on weapon speed) and that’s that. Blizzard’s reluctance to even touch those stats is kind of worrying, though.

“That might be true, but finding all of any of the end game sets was a lot harder in D2…”

Pindleskin. I do miss pindle runs. You could find all the set items there (except cow king leathers).

Who would do that? I did.

How long it would take? At lot less hours than I have on D3. 1/10 of time would be a wild guess (depends how long trolling gris set takes to show up. Tal ammy is likely to show up.). The fact that you don’t need to care about the roll on items on most of the items is just a plus.

IAS nerf is a bad movement…. If the dev team understand / know that how fast players reaction to monster is based on Attack speed. They will know +XX main is only paper and IAS do increase players choice on action…faster your attack faster your reaction…thats why 2 hder is useless in all Diablo game.